Thursday, February 22, 2007

DSOrganize 2.5 Is Out

Good evening folks. Just updating to let you know that DSOrganize 2.5 is out! Included in this release is a vastly improved plugin architecture that has more exposed API and over 2MB dedicated RAM to each plugin or executable while running. Also included is shortcuts, with support for adding them to the home screen! Check out the latest version at DragonMinded.com. Just to remind you, noone has found the easter egg yet! I'll give you a hint: it has something to do with the sound.dat file. As an added incentive, as soon as someone finds the easter egg, I'll put out the latest source!

A few of you might have noticed me lagging on the releases front lately. I'm EXTREMELY busy. With two physics classes at school and work all weekend every weekend, its hard to dedicate much free time to working on DSOrganize. I'm sorry about this, and hope to resume my frantic release schedule of almost once a week after I finish this semester in mid-May. An alternative would be for me to quit my job and dedicate weekends to more coding, but this would require a) me to beg for donations so I could afford gas for school, and b) donations. ;P I'd much rather leave it as I am now, asking for nothing except for an occasional thank you.

Enjoy the latest release, and as always, suggestions, icon sets, translations, and bug reports are always welcome. Just be patient as I find time to reply to everything. And of course, come hang out at #dsorganize on irc.freenode.net and idle (or chat, but that's against the rules of IRC).

I'm having problems with the plugin architecture. I figured it would be as simple as replacing the specs, .h files and plugin.c, but I've been encountering some problems.

I noticed that the 3-line description is now just a string, where before it was a function. Guess it's not a huge deal, but won't that require a less elegant solution to using the path to load the description?

Another issue now and one that seems like it'll be tough to resolve is that the plugin crashes at what seems to be random times. The only indicator is that it always is during the loading process. I can't pin it down. It'll crash while parsing a file, then I'll reboot and it will crash after parsing the file. And then just at different times during the parsing. I'm not sure where to begin looking for this one...

Thanks for the great application! I really appreciate you taking the time out of your schedule to work on developing this. I guess you've said that it's just a hobby or personal project, but there are many of us who appreciate that you've released it to the public!

I and some friends on Brazil are working on a project called "nds homebrews -br". The aim is to show to the users a more touch about homebrews and how though is the work whit then. We have a colunist to talk about new game releases, and another that is explaining from zero how to build games with palib.

I want to make a interview whit you, to post to the brazilian users how is your day-by-day routine, what you study and your plans for the future. Im sure this will be greaty to nds users to understand more about the nds homebrew scene.

If you are interested, just reply on leonardozimbres (put @ here) gmail (dot) com , or check our site at www.ndsbr.blogspot.com

hey big mistake gnirfleo . those ds homebrew download file you have does not work on m3 except for .ds.gba ..... .nds cannot boot up except for axe.. which is the smallest actually that why it boot up. maybe you should extend to ds.gba too aight.. thanks

I had to ditch the elegant loading solution in favor of a cached option because there are plugins that could require the entire memory space, thus making it impossible to have them all loaded at once. Try out the writeDebug function which dumps data straight to a debug.txt file and is used as if it was printf. Also, you can set up console mode in plugins to trace where crashes happen.

In the Reminders/Calender function does this have an alarm. For example, say I put a reminder in 3 hours I have to throw my dirty underwear out or on March 25th I have to get my vasectomy; will the an alarm of some sort go off?

When you can have some time to chat? And how we can do, msn? Sorry about the comment deletion on our site, one of our colunistis deleted it, thinking about to make of the interview more of a surprise, since we will changing the site focus from "ds games" to "ds homebrews" from little steps. Sorry because that comment deletion was strange, never mind.

Thanks for the reply dragonminded, I'll give it a shot when I get a chance and let you know how it goes.

Just thought of a feature request. It'd be nice if you could start music playing and then go to a different screen. I guess this might cause problems for plugins and things, well maybe plugins could be disabled. I have no idea how much CPU/memory is consumed by the mp3 playing but sometimes I want to go check out my calendar, and stopping/starting the music is a pain. Maybe the music could just be paused and resume when you return to the (guess you can't do this currently) music player.

I've been using DSOrganize for quite a long time and I'm really happy about it. No doubt, best DS Homebrew ever! :)

As far as I concerned, there is no txt file viewer/editor that has a 'search text' function yet (as one in windows notepad) & as a programmer myself, i see no particular limitation whatsoever to implement one. It shouldn't be that hard and I believe by having this function many gamers will be happy because they can easily go back and forth through game faqs. Correct me if I'm wrong. :D

That's all I can think about giving a suggestion. Once again, DSOrganize is really really awesome, loving it.

Is writeDebug buffered or does it flush immediately? I have surrounded the call that is crashing my plugin with writeDebugs but don't end up with any output. Of course, it still seems to be crashing without even using that call, so I don't know what's going on. :)

The stupid thing is that the call is used elsewhere just fine. And like I've said before, this one isn't getting called. It just crashes if it exists in the code.